OverviewSinergia is a ASP.NET,Workflow Foundation&Windows Communication Foundation based free help desk solution, developed in C# 3.5, by me. It solves all the Workflow and WCF plumbing implementing one help desk scenario, providing tools to customize it to fit your needs. Why make another help desk framework? The truth is that implementing help desk software solutions is not easy, unfortunately (or fortunately) one size does not fit all. Every enterprise represents a different universe of problems, processes, and resources. |
This project is based on the idea that Microsoft's technologies Workflow Foundation, and Windows Communication Foundation bring new opportunities in the development IT systems, and existing solutions are often either too expensive, or based on old technologies, or not customizable enough, or just intended for a different technological platform.
Vision
The vision of the project is to deliver a customizable platform for accelerating the development of help desk-like solutions (you know, one form that fires a workflow process), capable of integrating to the enterprise's software ecosystem, taking advantage of all the benefits available in the latest version of Microsoft's .NET platform.
Audience
Sinergia is intended primarily for IT software developers in need of a .net base solution that may speed the development of a help desk or order tracking application, so in a way you can think of it as an service desk accelerator for developers .
On the other hand it is within the goals of the project to have a set of pre made ready to use templates suitable for the most common scenarios, targeted for non technical staff.
Target scenarios
Targeted scenarios are the following ones:
- Help Desk, Ticket Management Solutions. User fills a webfrom or an InfoPath form reporting a technical incident with some piece of software or hardware, and he gets a unique "ticket" with which he can track the incident in the system. The support staff evaluates, dispatches internally the incident following some criteria, until it gets resolved.
- Claim Management. User fills a webform reporting an incident with some enterprise's services. The incident goes through a sequence of custom steps defined for managing the incident.
- Order tracking. User fills a form requesting something, e.g. purchase order, work order, etc. The order goes thorough a sequence of steps usually involving approval by some superior, depending on some business rule, until finally the requesting user get notified of the approval or rejection of his/her request.
Design principles
This is the set of principles that guide the current design approach.
Customizability. Help desk software is bound to be customizable. Customizability is needed to fit the enterprise's reality, in terms of look&feel, data structures, and business processes.
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Pluggability. This is about the ability to compose into one larger software system, by means of consuming and exposing services in order to leverage the enterprise's set of software assets.
Of course the design is meant to be kept simple, maintainable, escalable, based on standards, and performant but I feel the principles stated above are the ones guiding the current design.
License
The Sinergia project is currently licensed under the Lesser General Public License model.
Help wanted!
Help is good, right now we could use it in a number of places, like: user interface design, workflow development, workflow designer development, sharepoint integration.
Contact us
If you have a question, post it in the Sinergia project's user group, so that others may benefit from the discussion.
Otherwise feel free to email me or comment in the project's blog.
